Tape Backup is not a Disaster Recovery Strategy!

While tape has been a mainstay medium for backup and archival of data ever since we started creating data, it will be almost useless at returning a business to service on a timely basis in case of a disaster. <14% of businesses would be able to recover their business from tape in the aftermath of a disaster – these businesses typically have only one server.

I work closely with a number of large companies on their disaster recovery and business continuity practices to walk them through the risks and issues related to rebuilding after a disaster. This usually includes helping them in testing these plans to prove that active systems stay active, fail over systems fail over and that the rest can be recovered or rebuilt on a timely basis.

In one review for a company in the travel industry that was using IBM’s TSM for backup to tape, we showed how the bare-metal rebuild of a server was going to require data to be retrieved from over 240 tapes. This makes the rebuild process very time consuming. A tape drive has to be dedicated to that server for the duration of the recovery and somebody has to be on point make sure that the right tape is available and mounted when requested. Total server recovery time was almost 27 hours. It would have been the first of almost 130 servers that needed to be recovered from tape.

More tape drives?

More people?

Less servers with more data?

None of these options will allow the company to recover and still stay in business if the only answer was tape. Tape is great for archival purposes of historical data that needs to be maintained for several years in case of an audit. Tape is great to get copies of data to a 3rd protected location. That’s right – 3RD location! If you are relying on tape to store data outside of a single location – hopefully you are in that 14%.

In this case we used storage replication mechanisms to ensure that all data was in at least two locations other than it’s live location. Also we did some extensive tuning to TSM that would make sure that any server recovery would only need to harvest from at most 80 tapes. The average was around 50 tapes.

While tape still has its place incorporations large an small, it has to be the last line of defense for business continuity – not the first!

Craig has over 25 years of Technology Consulting experience including 10 years in Project Leadership roles. He has extensive background working with large scale, high-profile systems integration and development projects that span a customer’s organization, and experience designing robust solutions that bring together multiple platforms from Intel to Unix to Mainframe technologies with the Internet.